I have to admit: I don’t feel forty.

Granted, also have to admit that I’m writing this Tuesday night, a couple of days shy of actually turning the big 4-0.  Even still, forty feels like a strange number to hear cross my lips (or to type onto the screen).

And while I’d prefer to never ever use the phrase “middle-aged,” I suppose that there’s something to be said for “owning it.”  So it was of no small interest to find that David Brooks (of The New York Times and The Road to Character) had recently written a short essay on the topic . . . and had even mentioned Christian theologian Karl Barth in the process.  After discussing a new book about “new life in the 40s and 50s,” Brooks says:

The theologian Karl Barth described midlife in precisely this way. At middle age, he wrote, “the sowing is behind; now is the time to reap. The run has been taken; now is the time to leap. Preparation has been made; now is the time for the venture of the work itself.”

The middle-aged person, Barth continued, can see death in the distance, but moves with a “measured haste” to get big new things done while there is still time.

It’s a nice thought, for sure.  And it’s something we’ll probably hear more and more as we keep living longer and longer.  It lines up with some business and “character” books that I’ve read.  And I hope that it’s true.

You can read the whole article here.  It’s nice thinking, for sure.  And, as is often the case, Brooks’s writing is clear.  Beyond the Barth quotation, my favorite part of the essay:

By middle age you might begin to see, retrospectively, the dominant motifs that have been running through your various decisions. You might begin to see how all your different commitments can be integrated into one meaning and purpose. You might see the social problem your past has made you uniquely equipped to tackle. You might have enough clarity by now to orient your life around a true north on some ultimate horizon.

Life, of course, is rarely that easy and never that clear-cut.  But it’s definitely something to reflect on, to ponder, as if a new kind of possibility might open up.  We have no idea how it will open up, just that it might.  And maybe the next round of possibilities won’t seem so precluded.